Storytelling is all about picking the right angle. Ferris, an Austin, Texas-based startup is taking this concept to the next level with the world’s first data-driven, video-based social sharing service.

Ferris delivers a mobile app that enables users to record and share videos up to two minutes in length from within a single interface. It pulls location data, date and time, hashtags and other metrics to identify common denominators and weave clips into cohesive streams that provide “united narratives” about various points of interest.

The startup was founded by a group of entertainment and special effects professionals, one hailing from MTV, who set out to exploit the “power that multiple perspectives have in telling a story” in order to turn video sharing into a collaborative experience. Ferris touts that its app requires no video editing skills, which – combined with the fact that it’s free – makes it highly accessible for consumers of all walks of life.

“Our team is passionate about shaking up the landscape of mobile video in a big way, and we can’t wait to get Ferris into the hands of users,” said Paul Boukadakis, the founding chief executive of Ferris. “There are too many missed moments in life, and we’re determined to change the experience of reliving and sharing these moments in a dynamic, fun way. Ferris provides a video timeline of your life and the lives of those around you. The sum really is greater than the individual parts.”

A stitch in time…

Ferris lets users browse videos based on a wide range of criteria, and includes an Explore tab that displays a continuously updated list of new and trending clips.  What Ferris aims to do is automatically contextualize videos in the social sense, leveraging those environmental cues in order to create one cohesive story.  So if several guests at a wedding post videos from the same vicinity with the same hashtags, these clips will be stitched together into one, overlapping scenes based on time stamps.

This brings us to my favorite feature, the video preview.  Just slide your finger across the video screen, and you’ll be able to (slowly or quickly) skim through every scene that’s been compiled into a story.  It’s a great way to see an event in full, and to get to the scene you really want.  Not to mention, it’s magnitudes easier than sifting through multiple search results and hashtag results from multiple users, as you would on YouTube or most other video-sharing networks.

Despite the beautifully muted interface and playful feature set, Ferris faces quite the uphill battle in the mobile sector.  This newly launched beta app is entering a market currently dominated by Twitter’s Vine app and Instagram’s new video capabilities.  To this end, Ferris’ feature set outruns and outwits most of what you’ll find from competitors, namely the ability to record longer and manage more post-record edits.  The result is a well-thought app designed for true video memes that’s also inherently collaborative.

“We are approaching the idea of video in a fundamentally different way,” says Chris Shaheen, Lead Engineer and cofounder for Ferris. “It’s not on the creation of short clips with the intention of going viral. Ferris is without the pressure of social sites, where individual videos aren’t nearly as powerful as the whole.  By thinking of video as all pieces of a larger 2D fabric that you can scoop and play in one stream, moving forward we’ll be a more powerful differentiator as we enhance that idea and take it to the next level.”

A beta release of the Ferris app is available for download from the App Store.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher